While France votes, the world continues to turn, and at full speed. The war in Ukraine is accelerating major international movements and placing foreign affairs at the heart of the presidential agenda. If it delayed the entry into the campaign of Emmanuel Macron, the Russian invasion also clearly exposes the vision of the world of Marine Le Pen, the opposite of the outgoing president and the diplomacy carried out by France in recent years.
The policy proposed by the National Rally would have massive consequences for France’s place in the world. “Emmanuel Macron proposes the continuation of the strengthening of Europe and the influence of France on international bodies, underlines Michel Duclos, special adviser at the Institut Montaigne and author of France in the upheaval of the world (The Observatory, 2021). Marine Le Pen would lead a policy of isolation from France, leaving the integrated command of NATO and making our relations with the European Union impossible.
Faced with the intentions of the RN and the tight polls in the second round, panic is mounting in Brussels as in Washington, worried about seeing the Western alliance disintegrate in the midst of a confrontation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Overview of the main points of international divergence between the two candidates.
• Faced with Russia, sanctions or an “alliance”
Marine Le Pen, who visited Vladimir Putin in the 2017 in-between rounds, condemned the invasion of Ukraine from day one. The RN candidate, however, plans to campaign for “a strategic rapprochement between NATO and Russia” once the conflict is over… And in her program, she advocates an “alliance” with this country on certain substantive issues, such as European security or the fight against terrorism (which it has carried out “more consistently than any other power”).
Since the beginning of the war, she has never ceased to express her opposition to the sanctions against Moscow, believing that they are harmful to European consumers. “A Le Pen presidency would create enormous breaches in European and transatlantic unity vis-à-vis Russia,” says Tara Varma, director of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. : since if France opposes it, other European states could take advantage of the domino effect and lift these sanctions.
For his part, Emmanuel Macron tried to follow the same line against the Kremlin during his five-year term: dialogue and firmness. While there has never been any question of going back on the European sanctions imposed on Moscow since the invasion of Crimea in 2014, the French president has tried on several occasions to open new avenues of negotiations with Vladimir Putin (in referring in particular to the need to “reinvent a security and trust architecture” between the EU and Russia in 2019), without success. He has been trying to maintain a dialogue with the Russian president since the start of this war, while strengthening economic and diplomatic sanctions.
• The European project, the main point of disagreement
Emmanuel Macron warned on April 12 that the second round of presidential elections would be “a referendum on Europe”. Offers him to move towards “sovereign Europe” for which he has been campaigning for five years, and whose idea is gaining ground in Brussels, but also in Germany and the Netherlands.
A dynamic that Marine Le Pen wants to stop at all costs. In 2017, his desire to leave the euro zone had cost him dearly. Today, no more question of this promise or, officially, of a “Frexit”, the candidate says she wants to “reform the European Union from the inside”. “With this vocabulary, she says exactly the same thing as Viktor Orban in Hungary and Matteo Salvini in Italy, remarks Tara Varma. Her European line remains far right.”
In his program, Le Pen explains that he wants to create “a European Alliance of Nations which is intended to gradually replace the European Union” and claims to have developed contacts “with several heads of government” to carry out this project. In the meantime, the RN intends to give precedence to its own rules over European law, in contradiction with the EU treaties. “Le Pen’s new strategy copies Hungarian and Polish models, says former British diplomat Ian Bond in a note for the Center for European Reform. It refuses to apply the European laws which it dislikes, in particular those which prohibit it from favoring French citizens over those of other European countries. But, unlike Hungary, Poland or even the United Kingdom, France is indispensable to the EU.”
If Paris entered into open conflict with the European institutions, as Marine Le Pen proposes, the whole European edifice would be in danger. “A Le Pen presidency would put a stop to the European project, there is no doubt about it, confirms Michel Duclos. The European institutions would try to cushion the blow, but Europe would be paralyzed for five years. Hungary and Poland are secessionist in terms of values but they have little impact on the economic, financial or agricultural policies of the EU, unlike France Le Pen who would deal a terrible blow to Europe.
• The Franco-German duo in balance
If Emmanuel Macron has made the Franco-German couple the heart of the European reactor, notably convincing Angela Merkel of a joint loan to finance recovery plans in the summer of 2020, Marine Le Pen wants a divorce, or at least a separation. At a press conference on April 13, she denounced “French blindness to Berlin” and promised, in her program, to “put an end to industrial cooperation with Germany in the field of armaments” . The RN candidate says she prefers “strengthened cooperation with the United Kingdom” and her pro-Brexit government.
• NATO, a dividing line with the West
In 2019, faced with provocations from Recep Tayyip Erdogan and constant threats from Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron declared NATO “in a state of brain death”. Since then, the war in Ukraine has awakened the Transatlantic Alliance and France is taking its full part in the Western military effort to counter Vladimir Putin. In parallel with his pro-NATO commitment, the outgoing president is keen to develop a defense Europe, in order to ensure the continent’s military autonomy.
Marine Le Pen, she wants to leave the integrated command of NATO and says she refuses “any followership of the United States”. “Leaving the integrated command of NATO would mean a considerable mistrust of the rest of the Western world with regard to France, but also a considerable loss of influence of France abroad, believes Michel Duclos. We would lose control on the advance of the movements in Eastern Europe or on the restructuring of the armed forces. On the political level, this would also mean the rupture of the Western front, which would encourage Vladimir Putin to continue his action.”
• With Le Pen, a new system of random alliances
In her programme, Marine Le Pen criticizes a single country, the United States for the “extraterritoriality” of their jurisdiction, she only mentions Russia indirectly when speaking of the war in Ukraine and only describes China as the country of origin of Covid-19. The RN candidate proposes to follow a line of foreign policy “neither submission to Moscow”, nor “following with regard to the Biden administration”;
According to the RN, France would then lead a “hands-free policy” abroad, focused on bilateral relations. “In reality, Le Pen follows the international logic of autocrats, on the model of Donald Trump, betting everything on unilateralism, analyzes Tara Varma. Everything is decided in the pure interest of France, without a position of principle but with a purely transactional logic.”
Iand Bond, of the Center for European Reform, believes that this “hands-free” policy reveals Marine Le Pen’s “delusions of grandeur” on the international scene: “This is a foreign policy cut out for a superpower, not for a European middle power that would have decided to neglect its alliances with the European Union and NATO.Even the United Kingdom, after Brexit, tried to compensate for its lost European influence by increasing its political and military involvement in the NATO, but also its bilateral relationship with the United States.”
In the context of the war in Ukraine, there is no doubt that the debate between the two candidates, Wednesday, April 20, will largely focus on the international scene and the place that France occupies there.